Norsland Lefse Scales Tradition for the Digital Age with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

A fast, flexible foundation to grow both DTC and B2B.

With the holiday season approaching and paid campaigns on hold, Lori and the Brilliance team knew they needed to move quickly. They replatformed Norsland Lefse to BigCommerce in just three months — fast enough to test advertising and go into peak season with a plan in place.

“We went live in three months, which was really awesome,” said Lori. “It enabled us to start running paid advertising and test them out ahead of our busy season so we could go into it with a plan.”

That rapid timeline was just the beginning. BigCommerce also gave the team the flexibility to scale into more advanced features as needed, including tools to support their growing B2B strategy. “To grow our B2B side, we’ve implemented customer groups to enable wholesale customers to purchase at their specific price points,” Lori shared.

On the operations side, the team introduced Kit Builder to streamline inventory tracking across product bundles. “We had created separate buckets for different product listings on the site, which sometimes caused items to show as out of stock when they actually weren’t, and we’d miss out on sales,” Lori said. “Now with Kit Builder, we can manage all inventory in one place, and everything stays accurate.”

Building trust through a better customer experience.

With BigCommerce as the foundation, Norsland Lefse focused on modernizing the user experience — from site navigation to post-purchase engagement.

One of the biggest wins came from improving the mobile experience. “We saw a 62% improvement in our mobile conversion rate year over year,” Lori said.

Shipping clarity was another key area of focus. With many of Norsland Lefse’s products being perishable, shipping costs can be high, and often a source of customer frustration. “Our shipping can be expensive relative to the cost of the product because it's perishable. We use FedEx two-day shipping and ice packs, which increases the cost,” Lori explained.

To address this, the team implemented ShipperHQ to apply pricing rules based on product type and weight, reducing cart abandonment from sticker shock. “We're able to use ShipperHQ to use pricing rules. That helps to ensure customers are happier with their shipping costs and not so surprised when they get to checkout,” she said.

Other tools like Klaviyo and BigCommerce’s native product reviews helped deepen customer engagement and trust. “We're using the out-of-the-box reviews along with Klaviyo to invite people back to offer product reviews. That has worked out really well for us as well,” Lori shared.

Turning seasonal demand into recurring revenue.

In October 2024, Norsland Lefse kicked off the holiday season with a “buy six packs, get one free” promotion — a campaign that drove strong early sales and introduced new customers to the brand. With BigCommerce in place, the team could launch the offer quickly and build on the momentum heading into their busiest time of year.

To turn those one-time purchases into long-term value, Norsland Lefse rolled out a new subscription program just ahead of December. “We set up a subscription service so that people could buy a gift subscription in 2024 that we would fulfill in 2025,” said Lori.

The program is managed through MINIBC and replaced a time-consuming manual process. “Now we're using MINIBC. The orders just show up every month like every other order that needs to be fulfilled, and we get this great stream of recurring revenue. I think about 10% of our overall BigCommerce orders right now are from subscriptions, which is really great. And that will only grow over time,” she added.

To stay connected with shoppers even when items were temporarily unavailable, the team also introduced a waitlist for popular products like lefse. “We set up a wait list on our site to sign up for lefse,” Lori explained. “So that when it did come back in stock, we would email folks that were looking for lefse to invite them back.”